Richard S. Sutton

Richard Sutton
Sutton at NeurIPS 2025
Born
Richard Stuart Sutton

1957 or 1958 (age 68–69)
Ohio, U.S.
CitizenshipCanada since 2015,
USA until 2017
EducationStanford University (BA)
University of Massachusetts, Amherst (MS, PhD)
Known forTemporal difference learning
The Bitter Lesson
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
ThesisTemporal credit assignment in reinforcement learning (1984)
Doctoral advisorAndrew Barto
Doctoral students
Websiterichsutton.com

Richard Stuart Sutton FRS FRSC (born 1957 or 1958) is a Canadian computer scientist. He is a professor of computing science at the University of Alberta, fellow & Chief Scientific Advisor at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, and a research scientist at Keen Technologies. Sutton is considered one of the founders of modern computational reinforcement learning. In particular, he contributed to temporal difference learning and policy gradient methods. He received the 2024 Turing Award with Andrew Barto.